Students build, eat ‘world’s largest’ ice cream sandwich

Twenty-seven pounds of flour, 48 eggs, 9 pounds of white sugar, 9 pounds of brown sugar, 15 pounds of butter and about 10 gallons of vanilla ice cream — those are just some of the ingredients that went into making the state’s (unofficially) largest ice cream sandwich Feb. 21.

There isn’t an official record in Washington for the biggest ice cream sandwich, but that didn’t stop a group of middle school students from trying to set one by building the giant treat that eventually covered half of a lunchroom table.

The group hailed from middle schools across the Issaquah School District and came together at Beaver Lake Middle School over the midwinter break for a camp ran by !mpact, the district’s before and after school care program. Derrick Capdeville, an !mpact program manager, ran the camp Feb. 18-22 and said he wanted the week to be record-breaking.

“I thought to myself, the kids, they would totally be excited about something sweet and something big,” Capdeville said.

The group of about 40 students liked the idea of making a giant ice cream sandwich and voted for vanilla in the middle, he said.

“I did much, much research and officially there is no state record,” he said. “So, I feel we are going to set the record today … There is no record keeper of Washington state, but you never know — maybe you can start some unofficial afterschool club of record-breaking events.”

The work began Feb. 19, when four students — Rachel Rosewater, Cindy Xiao, Katya Yegorova and Gwen Weldon — helped one of the district’s kitchen mangers, Jill Meitzel, bake the cookie crust.

“It’s really cool because not every day you get to make an ice-cream sandwich — a giant ice cream sandwich,” said Yegorova, who attends sixth grade at Beaver Lake.

Using the district’s large-quantity recipe, Meitzel ran the heavy mixer while her young helpers added enough fixings for 2,400 1-ounce chocolate-chip cookies.

“It was really fun,” said Xiao, who also attends sixth grade at Beaver Lake. “The cookie dough was really hard for some reason so it was hard for me to roll it.”

In total, the whole baking process that day took three hours.

“It was kind of tempting not to eat the cookie dough, even after the raw eggs,” Rosewater said. “It was hard, sitting there, watching a big mixer bowl full of chocolate. I’m telling you, that is torture to me, to watch a big bowl of chocolate and not eat it for two more days.”

The slabs of cookie crust had two days to rest in the refrigerator before Meitzel and the students added the ice cream and constructed the dessert fit for King Kong. To help eat their creation, the middle school students invited a group of about 60 elementary students from the midwinter break camp at Challenger Elementary School.

“This is the best day ever,” 7-year-old Luke Gurr said to his friend Lachlan Clark as the two Sunny Hills Elementary School students walked to a table, carrying a portion of the ice cream sandwich on their plates.

“This is humongous,” Clark, 8, said.

Madison Mendonca, who attends fourth grade at Challenger, said she was amazed at how hard the other students worked to make the huge treat.

“It’s really good because they made the bread homemade and then put the ice cream, so they were creative and resourceful,” she said.

Her classmate Makenzie Klug said she wasn’t sure if they would be able to eat the entire thing.